The Trump Plan to Combat Opioids

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For Donald Trump, combatting the opioid crisis has always been an intensely personal and political issue. Trump, who lost his older brother to alcoholism, doesn’t drink and has an eighties-drug-warrior view of combatting illegal substances. His Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions, has overturned Obama-era guidelines aimed to soften penalties for nonviolent drug offenses.

Trump was one of many candidates in the 2016 election to face the human toll of the opioid crisis in New Hampshire, a state that had one of the largest spikes in overdose deaths from 2014 to 2015, but Trump made it more central to his candidacy in that crucial state than his opponents did. Trump won New Hampshire’s Republican primary by almost twenty points, and he has said, both publicly and privately, that his promise to help solve the crisis sealed his victory. “I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den,” Trump told Mexico’s President Peña Nieto in a leaked conversation.

On Thursday afternoon, Trump announced his plan to combat the opioid crisis. The big headline was that, unlike what Trump promised earlier this year, his Administration would not pursue the more drastic option of declaring the crisis “a national emergency,” which would have made more funds available to the federal government to fight it. Instead, Trump took the narrower path of declaring the crisis “a national public-health emergency” under a law that will ease some regulatory burdens and move resources to communities more swiftly.

Trump said that the addiction crisis would be “defeated,” though he didn’t quite offer a plan detailed enough to do that. Most of the steps he announced are modest and have bipartisan support (excluding his insistence that a southern border wall would help alleviate the crisis) or too vague to properly assess. The announcement was unsurprising: after over-promising, Trump under-delivered.

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